The decadent image : the poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson / [electronic resource]
Boyiopoulos, Kostas,author.
This book examines systematically, for the first time, poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This study examines Wilde's neglected early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons's poetry, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexing non-collisions.
The Decadent Image; Copyright; Contents; Series Editor's Preface ; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations ; 1 Introduction: Sensual Text, Textual Sense - Aestheticism to Decadence; I. Oscar Wilde; 2 'That love-enraptured tune':  Eros and Art(ifice) ; 3 'Charmides' and The Sphinx: Crashing into Objets d'Art; II Arthur Symons; 4 Strangeness and the City: The Self among Fragmented Impressions; 5 Bianca's Body: Nerves and the Flâneurie of Flesh; III Ernest Dowson; 6 'A little while': Expiration in Suspension; 7 Closely Apart: Aestheticising the Non-Encounter; Coda: Modernist Responses
BibliographyIndex
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 Oct 2017).
This book examines systematically, for the first time, poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This study examines Wilde's neglected early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons's poetry, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexing non-collisions.
Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900
Symons, Arthur, 1865-1945
Dowson, Ernest Christopher, 1867-1900
Decadence (Literary movement)
English poetry